google sites

I’ve had my CompSci department page live at my current school for nearly two years now. It links many of the resources students find invaluable and is regularly used across KS3, iGCSE and IB courses. However the new Google Sites layout is much easier to configure and seems to help with accessibility so I decided in the last few weeks of term to help smooth the handover process by rebuilding. The problem was I wanted to retain my extremely useful TinyURL shortcut and make it point to the new site – and that’s not possible.

The solution

So I will have to keep the homepage of the original site (fine, I’ll transfer ownership) but wanted a quick way to redirect automatically without having users click on a link. Luckily someone had already thought of a way to do this with (the old) Google Sites: URL Redirector Modified

Setting up the redirect

To set this up simply:

go to the Insert menu when editing the page in the old Google Sites

select More Gadgets…

click on Public and then enter “url redirector modified” in the search box

select the gadget

Next customise your redirect. The first textbox is for your new URL. I also chose 10 seconds for the timeout as I wanted the students to see a message about the new site before the redirect, however you could adapt as required.

I’m nearly a month into my flipped classroom approach and I’m already seeing the benefits (some of which I’m sharing as part of a whole-school INSET on Wednesday):

Students are – in the main – responding well to the video introductions or lessons

My tasks are becoming more diverse to cater for students who need additional challenges in the extended time we have in class

My department website is the central focus of most of my lessons, where students can find or create sections on concepts

EdPuzzle has been great at tracking video views and the embedded questions have helped me group students together where possible for remediation or further challenges

Students are learning to make best use of the time in my class to move forward at a pace that suits them and to engage in deeper learning tasks

I’ve included a little screenshot of one of the pages of my department website to show you how I am beginning to embed deeper learning tasks into each concept.

While the layout isn’t pretty it is consistent and students are becoming used to completing the Task link (usually a Google Doc with some questions or challenges) before moving on to the Deeper Learning Tasks link.

I used an idea I picked up on whilst completing my Google Certifed Educator exams late last year: the Multi Media Text Set. This is where the student is given a number of different options: links to webpages, articles, videos, etc. so that they have an element of choice in each lesson. Here’s a screengrab of some of the deeper learning tasks for the Machine Instruction Cycle topic:

I have to thank the great Voxer group I’m part of for keeping me motivated, focussed and for sharing their own practices and challenges. One teacher (Shai McGowan) told the group about WSQ (pronounced whisk) as a way of collating feedback from students on the flipped approach. I’m currently using a mixture of EdPuzzle, Kahoot quizzes and 1:1 conversation with students (now I have the time!!) to gauge their progress but am interested in reading further. I did a little searching and found the following comprehensive guide to WSQing your flipped lessons:

The next step is to try the approach with a few classes. While my target class for the flipped approach has been my year 10s I have been teaching younger students the art of note taking (Cornell style) so they should be by now more than capable of completing the Summary part of a WSQ. Come to think of it, I’d be very interested to see who are better – those who have been explicitly taught to take notes in a certain way or those who haven’t.

I used (and sorely miss) Geddit. It was very useful in gauging student understanding during a lesson and was a low-cost, high-gain tracking tool that I could refer to after lessons, before end of topic tests and during parents evenings (if needed).

I decided to try and create something along a similar vein, but using Google Forms and Sites. The advantage of this is that I can restrict access to those within the school, automatically use GAFE login details, and – in the future – customise it with more complex Google Apps Scripts so that students can be emailed and Google Charts automatically generated into a dashboard (I’m thinking by student or class at the moment).

My late-night sketch was simple enough – the teacher could choose a class and enter a question into a teacher-only Google Form. This would then be parsed by a Google Script to somehow display the most recently entered class and question in or above the student Google Form. When I’m generating reports into the dashboard I can use the timestamps from each Google Form response spreadsheet to correlate which question the student response relates to.

Anyway this was easy enough to prototype:

Teacher question control form

Student response form

The problem however was getting the most recent teacher question to appear in the Google Form. I decided to create a new Google Site and see if I could publish a range of the teacher Google Sheet as a webpage. I thought that this would be the easiest way to display the current question.

First I used a Google Sheet query in a new tab (called Question Feed) to reverse the order of the Google Form submissions:

=query('Form responses 1'!A1:Z, "select * order by A desc", 1)

I then created another Google Sheet tab (called Web Page) to create the view to be embedded in the Google Site:

I managed to publish this tab as a web page and then went about embedding it into my Google Site. All worked great! However Google Sheets only seem to refresh every 5 minutes so I investigated a way of doing something similar using a Google Script.

Using code similar to the following I was able to change the page title of the Google Site’s current (only) page to the most recent question submitted:

I added the script to the Google Site and set a trigger to run the function every minute.

The student view of the system currently looks like this:

Yes there are UX issues – such as the page refresh to get a new question, or the need to click on “Submit another response” to change the teacher question or add another student response, however I think I’m happy with it as a starting point.

Please feel free to use the above code if it is useful to you. I’m going to try it out with a few classes in the next few weeks and see if I can use some real data to create reports from. Any comments on how I can improve the system would also be greatly appreciated.